Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us
by TheBookshelfDweller
Summary: It's a kiss. Then it's two, then a few more, and then several beyond the count. Then it's clothes-stripping, up-the-stairs-fumbling, a quasi-three-legged-racing, blind-bed-finding. Then it's sex. But it's also more. It is also this.


**Author's note: A ficlet because Richard Siken happened to Tumblr, reminded me to re-read 'Crush', which in turn made me beyond emotional, and I've been in a very johnlock mood as it is. Need I say more?**

* * *

__'Hello darling, sorry about that.__  
__Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we__  
__lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell__  
__and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.__  
__Especially that, but I should have known.__  
__You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together__  
__to make a creature that will do what I say__  
__or love me back.__  
__I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are __ __not__  
__feeding yourself to a bad man  
against a black sky prickled with small lights.'__

__\- Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out by Richard Siken__

* * *

Of course they're at the bottom of the stairs when it happens. Where else would they be? John's backpack is by the wall, his shirts folded inside. Ready to go. He's not going. He just came. He's staying. If you ask Sherlock, he's staying forever.

They look like strangers in the hallway, awkward and foreign to each other. Foreign to themselves, too. Because:

John has a wife. John's wife is an assassin. John left his wife. John is back in Baker Street.

Sherlock has a heart. Sherlock's heart is in mortal danger. Sherlock can't leave his heart. Sherlock's heart is back in Baker Street.

"__You leave books on the lip of the tub when you take a bath and that's horrible because paper and water don't mix well, but I'll let you drown all my books if you stay"__, Sherlock wants to say. "__I'm sorry"__, he also wants to say. John wants to reply, to all of it. Neither of them do. It's a whole conversation that never happens. Because it happened once before, or something similar did, and Sherlock still remembers the crater left in its wake. What happens instead is what should have followed the conversation. Just like the first time, they skip to the reckless part.

It's a kiss. Then it's two, then a few more, and then several beyond the count. Then it's clothes-stripping, up-the-stairs-fumbling, a quasi-three-legged-racing, blind-bed-finding. Then it's sex.

But it is also: the apple bloom being stripped from trees by merciless April showers, and a thousand small deaths never mourned by the callous world. Sherlock rejoices in each. There's too much movement and not enough grace and it's as sensible as a flightless bird testing gravity. Sherlock relishes it. It's visceral or it's vagabond or it's both. In any case, it's Sherlock's bony elbows, and John's tired skin, and it's post-modern Mary Shelly writing bad prose on a train from North Greenwich to Baker Street on the Jubilee line, talking about stitches and and creatures of a madman's fantasy and new life. In any case, it's them. Sherlock adores it.

There are John's hands – describe touch, you can't, John's hands are not soft sandpaper or the vellum of old books, they're just hands, it's just skin, and there are no words. There is John's mouth – describe taste, you can't, it's just warmth, and breath, and humid humanness, and it doesn't have a name. There's John's breathing – describe sound, you can't, it's the familiar pitch but not a note on the violin, it's not music, and the rhythm is faltering. There are John's eyes, into which Sherlock tries not to look and fails, and then tries never to look away and fails again. There it all is – John's just-skin-hands, and his nothing-tasting-mouth, and his non-musical breathing. John is the impenetrable sky in the moments just before a storm, glowing purple with suppressed lightning. Sherlock loves him.

__'Love, for you, is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion.'__

Sherlock is thankful that he does not believe in God, because he's heard that those who do are saved. Sherlock does not want any salvation any deity has to offer, not when he found it already, and the rest of them must be fools to think that there is more than this. And if they are the damned, the two of them, Sherlock thinks, then that's what they are. Good. Let them be. Heaven sounds like a boring concept anyway, and Sherlock was never one for eternal bliss.

This is what it must be like, he thinks, to have a religion. A one-worded prayer, hallowed and sacred and whispered in adoration. John's body is a place of worship, and Sherlock is desecrating it with utmost devotion. A cathedral built on broken vows and years of missing the point. John offers no protest and Sherlock is not as good a man, as strong a man as the one John Watson deserves so he doesn't stop, never stops. He can't. If this is religion, then Sherlock is possessed. Willingly and utterly bewitched and led astray.

Their bodies move together and it's a pagan ritual from the dark woods that grew when people were wilder and more honest and made music with their hands and feet and gods had animal horns.

'__It's terrifying.'__

Sherlock once loved, loved John Watson, or so he thought, but then he learned that there was a difference between loving the reflected cities in someone's eyes when they look at your face and see a map of another world, and you're just slightly bigger than life just then, and loving those very eyes that watch you, for nothing more than just being what they are. Sherlock loved John once, and he would have done terrible things for him, but that was then and this is now.

Now, he loves him better, and for him, he will do things far worse. He will ruin them both, in the end, or they'll ruin each other, and it will be right. They're not who they should be, not like this, not apart. So let them ruin each other, to their bare bones, because it is the only way for them to rebuild themselves. It's not mercy, but then again, they were never made for such things in the first place.

But to say that it is not mercy is not to say that it is not gentle, beyond measure, and worse for it. Almost cruel. Nothing soft, nothing easy about it, about this harsh gentleness, unrelenting, unforgiving, inescapable. It's who they are, their second coming, all their truths laid out and all their lies left at the door. It's the worst sort of exposition. Unbearable. A badly written paperback with a see-through plot that culminates too soon and flat characters with each though served like a half-cooked dish. It's their life. They are a few shabby motifs – a handgun, a syringe, a silly hat, and an address on the door. They're a twenty-page detective story with a stereotype villain and an unrealistic solution. It's their home.

Sherlock's skin is too thick, too concrete, but under John's touch, it is acceptable, simply for that small connection. Because it is not religion. It is endless, and ageless, and far, far more ruthless than any belief in history. It's the first language from the dawn of time, and the last thought of a dying mind, and everything in between.

It's not religion. It is love.

* * *

__'Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.__  
These, our bodies, possessed by light.  
Tell me we'll never get used to it.'

__Scheherazade by Richard Siken__

* * *

__(___the two quotes in the middle are also from ___Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out)__


End file.
